In a development that surely confirms we are living in a science fiction novel written by someone with a fondness for bureaucracy and billion-dollar gadgets, NASA has dispatched a remotely-controlled robot roughly the size of a compact car to perform surgery on a broken space telescope, a telescope that just so happens to be decorated in gold and staring permanently into the abyss of the universe.
The telescope in question is the beloved yet presently hobbled Hubble Space Telescope, humanity’s most famous peeping Tom of the cosmos. The problem stems from a gyroscope, a device that helps Hubble keep its eye steady while it gazes into unimaginably distant galaxies, which has apparently decided retirement sounds more appealing than precision. NASA, never one to give up on a perfectly functional 34-year-old instrument just because of a little vertigo, has decided to take action in the most 2024 way imaginable: by sending a robot to do a human’s job.
Enter Dextre, formally known as the Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator, which is the sort of name you give a robot if you want it to sound both vaguely charming and slightly threatening. Dextre will work in conjunction with the Canadarm2 robotic arm, which sounds like a B-list superhero but is in fact a marvel of Canadian engineering capable of fixing satellites, grabbing loose gear, and presumably apologizing while doing so. Together, the two are strolling out onto the International Space Station’s mobile servicing platform like a couple of intergalactic mechanics with a very specific union contract.
Unfortunately, the gig is not as straightforward as swapping out a battery. The work is being choreographed from Houston, a city that has never met a spacecraft it could not micromanage. Hubble’s orientation system is delicately sensitive, and Dextre must carefully remove a protective cover on a faulty gyroscope unit and attempt what NASA calls a power cycle. For the non-technical audience, that is essentially turning it off and back on again, a strategy that works miracles on Wi-Fi routers but enjoys considerably less guaranteed success at 340 miles above the Earth’s surface.
NASA officials remain cautiously optimistic, a tone they have perfected after decades of launching enormously expensive equipment into the perilous void of space where it can operate spectacularly or just ghost them entirely. If successful, the fix may extend Hubble’s life well into the 2030s, giving it ample opportunity to outlive several more ill-fated celebrity marriages and at least one Earth-based telescope meant to replace it.
“Our goal is to have two to three gyroscopes operational,” said a NASA official, optimistically under-selling what sounds suspiciously like triage for space hardware.
The operation is being streamed in real time, because nothing says cutting-edge science quite like watching robotic surgery on orbital hardware while eating takeout on your couch.
It is, ultimately, a testament to human ingenuity that we can build a gleaming billion-dollar physics experiment, launch it into orbit on a giant firework, keep it running for three decades and then attempt to fix it with a pair of robot arms from 199,000 miles away — all without anybody spilling coffee on the control panel.
In other words, NASA is doing what it always does: turning breakdowns into breakthroughs, one nervously orchestrated robot ballet at a time.
Because when it comes to saving a thirty-year-old telescope, apparently you really can just give it the old IT reboot and hope for the best.